Applications that process large data sets may face technical challenges and difficulties with respect to processing performance, application stability, and scalability, among other potential problems. For example, data processing applications may be slow to complete and may encounter additional stability problems when applied to very large data sets. Such large-scale data processing applications have become more common as the data volumes collected and analyzed by companies and other organizations has increased. At the same time, such organizations may have decreasing time windows to complete these large-scale processing tasks.
Despite advances in hardware, faster processors, virtualization techniques, cloud computing, and the like, organizations still face challenges and difficulties in performing large-scale data processing tasks.